Media and Publishing: Year In Review 2006

Originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year. Presented as archival content. Learn more.

This article was originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year, an annual print publication that
provides an overview of the year’s most-notable people and events.
Unlike most articles on Britannica.com, Book of the Year articles are not reviewed and revised after their initial publication.
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The Frankfurt Book Fair enjoyed a record number of exhibitors, and the distribution of free newspapers surged. TV broadcasters experimented with ways of engaging their audience via the Internet; mobile TV grew; magazine publishers promoted digital editions; and the popularity of e-books appeared to be on the rise.

Industry Trends

In 2006 the television industry found itself in the uncomfortable position of being redefined by an array of new media technologies and the habits they created in consumers. It was a distressingly familiar situation. Only a few years earlier, the major American television broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox—had had to make room for a vast new assortment of cable news, entertainment, and sports channels. Then a new generation of digital video recorders (DVRs) threatened to move viewers beyond the grasp of competitive scheduling and—more important—the advertisers who kept the industry afloat. The attack on the primacy of TV had been taken up by the seemingly limitless Internet, particularly the ever-more-sophisticated computers and handheld devices that made downloading, trading, and watching entire TV shows as easy as pointing and clicking.

Although the new video technologies threatened the TV industry’s traditional ways, they also opened unforeseen horizons for creativity and commerce. By the end of the 2005–06 TV season, most of the networks were allowing Internet surfers to view recently aired episodes of their most popular shows on the networks’ own Web sites, often for free. Other episodes were offered for sale (usually for no more than $2 an episode), either on the broadcast network’s Web site or via Apple Computer’s online iTunes store. After the end of the season, producers of NBC’s sitcom The Office and ABC’s hit adventure/mystery program Lost launched a small network of Web sites that wove show clips, unaired video, and freshly written material into Internet-only presentations that served both to keep fan enthusiasm high during the off-season and as a platform for selling DVDs and other show merchandise.

Most network TV executives had come to accept that their industry had to change—and change quickly—in order to keep its place as the preeminent medium for news and entertainment. To ignore the upstart media would mean commercial death. If TV companies turned the new technology to their favour, however, they might not only survive but enter a new era of prosperity.

The changes were coming slowly and often against the networks’ instincts. When a viewer uploaded Lazy Sunday, a rap video parody from NBC’s Saturday Night Live to the YouTube free video-clip Web site, NBC’s outrage at the copyright infringement was eased only after its executives realized that the appearance of the video online had given the fading comedy show a new burst of attention. Within months the network struck a deal to add more NBC clips to YouTube’s free online library. When the pilot for Nobody’s Watching—a sitcom that first had been commissioned by NBC and then was rejected by the WB network—leaked onto YouTube and began racking up impressive numbers of viewers, NBC again capitalized on the phenomenon by snapping up the rights to the program. Still unsure whether the show could cross over to a mainstream audience, the network created its own Nobody’s Watching Web site, set its cast and crew to work making more Internet-only episodes, and thereby transformed the new medium into a low-cost tryout vehicle.

Other industry changes only made TV production more expensive or threatened to dry up traditional revenue streams. Sales at the annual TV upfront advertising sales derby in May deflated by 2% from the previous year, in part because of Madison Avenue’s fear that DVR- and Internet-equipped viewers would no longer sit still long enough to watch their commercials. Broadcasters experimented with new forms of promotion; ads were turned into elaborate multipart capsule dramas (called content wraps) that played between the real shows, or companies were charged to place their products into the shows themselves. Meanwhile, production costs for new programs skyrocketed to new heights, while the traditional back-end revenue streams—network repeats, sales on VHS or DVD, and worldwide syndication—no longer seemed quite as guaranteed as they once had.

Organization and Regulation

Eager to economize, the owners of the American television industry’s two youngest and smallest networks, the WB and UPN, opted to merge their once fiercely competitive organizations into a single network known as the CW. The new network debuted in September with a fall season that offered its forebearers’ strongest shows along with a few new contenders. American television networks faced an aggressive stance from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission over content standards. In June the maximum fine that the agency could impose for over-the-air violations of decency standards by broadcasters was increased 10-fold to $325,000.

Australian Communications Minister Helen Coonan announced an overhaul of media ownership laws. The changes would end restrictions on foreign companies’ controlling more than 15% of a television company or more than 25% of a newspaper publisher, and they relaxed cross-media bans within the same city or regional market. Coonan also unveiled Channel A, a free-to-air service, and Channel B, a mobile-TV service, which were to be auctioned separately in 2007.

The British government increased the annual TV license fee paid by every British TV owner to £131.50 (about $229) on April 1. The BBC was requesting above-inflation annual increases in order to broaden digital TV and Internet services. Canada’s Heritage Minister Bev Oda planned a review of the mandate for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) as a public broadcaster. The CBC had come under criticism for increasing its non-Canadian content and for allowing its programming to follow the lead of commercial broadcasters. Control of Canada’s Thomson Corp., 70% owned by the Thomson family, passed in 2006 from patriarch Kenneth upon his death to his eldest son, David, who had been chairman since 2002. Thomson’s Toronto-based Woodbridge Co. held 40% in Bell Globemedia, owner of the Globe and Mail newspaper and of CTV, which was Canada’s largest commercial television network.

Mexico’s Federal Competition Commission prevented Mexican media giant Televisa from purchasing 50% of cable-TV and Internet provider Televisión Internacional. Mexico’s second largest media company, TV Azteca, engaged American Hispanic broadcaster Telemundo in a legal dispute over Nostromo, a production company that was working on Telemundo’s reality show Quinceañera.

Germany’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ProSiebenSat.1 Media, which in 2005 had been the target of a failed takeover by publishing house Axel Springer, agreed in December to be bought by private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Permira. Private equity groups also purchased two of Taiwan’s top cable-TV operators; U.S.-based Carlyle Group bought Eastern Multimedia, and South Korea’s MBK Partners bought China Network Systems. Cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder sold one-half of his share of TV broadcaster Central European Media Enterprises to private investors Apax Partners France, and CanWest and British company ITV sold Ireland’s TV3 network to private equity firm Doughty Hanson.

Walt Disney bought UTV Software Communications’ Hungama, an Indian children’s cable and satellite TV channel that broadcast in Hindi. India’s 2006 National Readership Survey found that print media were being overrun by satellite TV, which had 230 million viewers and more than 200 channels.

Programming

The larger American television networks shored up their schedules—and financial bottom lines—with inexpensive yet reliably popular unscripted reality or game shows. Following the programming trend, NBC chief Jeff Zucker announced in October that between 8 pm and 9 pm his network would air reality shows exclusively almost every night of the week. Most of the unscripted shows were critically reviled, but each network had at least one that was a major hit with viewers. CBS’s Survivor remained in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings after more than seven years. ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and NBC’s Deal or No Deal found devoted audiences, and the CW’s America’s Next Top Model earned some of the new network’s highest ratings. None, however, could touch Fox’s pop-music pageant, American Idol, which was TV’s most popular show in 2006. American Idol drew an average of 31 million viewers to its Tuesday-night broadcasts and only slightly fewer to the show’s Wednesday-night results segment. Other hit shows, including the remaining three in Nielsen’s season-long top five—CBS’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and ABC’s pair of sex-laced dramas, Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy—were lucky to attract more than 20 million viewers in any given week.

The year’s top Emmy Awards were handed to a number of network hits. Fox’s terrorist-fighting serial 24 was named the year’s best drama, and its star, Kiefer Sutherland, took home the trophy for best dramatic actor. Mariska Hargitay, star of NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit was named the year’s best dramatic actress. NBC’s The Office won for best comedy, and the award for best comic actress went to former Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus for her work in The New Adventures of Old Christine.Tony Shalhoub, who won the trophy for best comic actor with his starring role in USA’s detective show, Monk, was the sole cable series to win an Emmy in a major category.

Two of the three major network evening news shows went through another topsy-turvy year. At ABC the year began with a team of strikingly young coanchors, Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas, sharing the anchor desk of World News Tonight. The arrangement ended in late January when Woodruff was grievously wounded by a roadside bomb while on assignment in Iraq. Vargas continued as the anchor until May, when she stepped down to take maternity leave, and ABC veteran Charles Gibson was named the show’s sole anchor. CBS searched for a permanent replacement for longtime anchor Dan Rather (who had left the CBS Evening News under a cloud in March 2005) but did not consider interim anchor Bob Schieffer, a veteran nearing his 70th birthday. Instead, network chairman Leslie Moonves raided NBC’s Today for its popular coanchor, Katie Couric, and made her the first woman to be the sole anchor of a major network evening news show. Better known for her popularity and on-air warmth than for her hard-news acumen, Couric won mixed reviews for her CBS debut on September 5. Ratings for the show increased temporarily, but within a few weeks the show fell back into third place, trailing by a wide margin NBC’s Brian Williams and his top-ranked Evening News.

Cable news channels, led by Fox News and its main rival CNN, continued to be dominated by opinion-driven talk shows, such as Fox News’s consistently top-rated O’Reilly Factor with pugnacious conservative Bill O’Reilly. Comedy Central’s pair of satiric news shows, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, featuring Stephen Colbert, lampooned politicians and media figures from every part of the spectrum and won plaudits for their wit and intelligence. Meanwhile, the network news teams tried to match the 24/7 capabilities of cable news by creating Web sites that they could update around the clock and use to provide viewers access to unedited interviews and longer, more detailed worldwide reports.

The 2006 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup, held in Germany, averaged 93 million viewers per match and was broadcast live in 54 global markets. (SeeSports and Games:Sidebar.) FIFA’s TV-rights partner Infront provided coverage in virtually every country in the world. According to Infront, 41% of the cumulative audience was female, and some regions were estimated to have achieved a 90% market share. Video streaming was used to show matches in some countries when the time of the match was inconvenient for viewing live. Meanwhile, French cable network OLN saw a steep ratings decline for the 2006 Tour de France following the retirement of seven-time winner Lance Armstrong after the 2005 tour. The decline was exacerbated by the absence from the race of several of the top 2006 contenders because of a drug-doping scandal. (SeeSports and Games:Cycling.)

Twenty-five-year-old MTV, which reached 481.5 million households in 179 countries, inaugurated the Overdrive broadband video channel and the Flux video-sharing Web site. MTV’s Logo channel and Stolichnaya vodka co-produced a commercial-free documentary series about gay life in the U.S. called Be Real. A Mexican soap opera launched the Latin pop band RBD, whose popularity crossed over to non-Latinos in the U.S., Canada, and Asia. RBD’s three women and three men were actors in the megahit telenovela Rebelde, in which they played teenagers who decide to start a band.

In Britain satellite broadcaster BSkyB unveiled a version of Current TV, the user-generated content channel jointly produced by former U.S. vice president Al Gore and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt. British ITVPlay joined the lucrative quiz phone-in business with its game shows Quizmania and The Mint.Turner Broadcasting reviewed classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons shown on Britain’s Boomerang channel and, after a broadcasting watchdog group received complaints, voluntarily edited scenes in which smoking was depicted. Heavy alcohol consumption among young people was the target of the British government’s shock TV commercials “Know Your Limits.”

This 1940 Tom and Jerry drawing by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (who died in 2006) is …

Courtesy Everett Collection

Hong Kong’s Television Entertainment Licensing Authority allowed TVB to show Hollywood’s Academy Awards ceremony live, for the first time, because Taiwanese director Ang Lee and his movie Brokeback Mountain were nominees. China’s TV and radio hosts were ordered by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) to use putonghua (modern standard Chinese) and avoid mainland regional dialects or Hong Kong and Taiwanese accents. SARFT also banned foreign cartoons on Chinese TV from 5 pm to 8 pm in order to give way to homegrown animation characters. In other government actions, Thailand’s new military leaders censored Thai cable-TV reports concerning the foreign media’s coverage of the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and the Bulgarian media council revoked BBC’s broadcast license for allegedly having ceased all Bulgarian-language broadcasts.

Technology

The International Telecommunications Union announced a pact between more than 100 countries across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to switch from analog to digital audio and television broadcasting by mid-2015. During the period of transition, digital broadcasting would need to be introduced in ways that would not interfere with existing analog broadcasting.

Technological projects for providing mobile-TV service were undertaken in a number of countries. The French Agency for Industrial Innovation backed the Unlimited Mobile TV system, which was spearheaded by Alcatel and designed to make TV available on cellular (mobile) telephones through a combination of satellite coverage and terrestrial cellular networks. Alcatel signed up Samsung Electronics to develop mobile phones that would receive the satellite TV broadcasts. Germany’s pilot cell phone TV project, which used the Digital Video Broadcast Handheld (DVB-H) standard, was launched during the 2006 World Cup by cell phone operators E-Plus, O2, T-Mobile, and Vodafone. DVB-H technology enabled German TV and radio to broadcast over 16 channels. Telecom Italia Media increased investments in digital terrestrial TV to €58.6 million (about $75 million) to improve channels La7 and MTV, which broadcast to cell phones by using DVB-H technology. The first commercial DVB-H mobile-TV service for the Asian Pacific region was launched by Finland’s Nokia and Vietnam’s Multimedia Corp. in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Korea’s mobile-TV standard, Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, was introduced to China and India to allow the broadcast of digital-TV programs via conventional terrestrial transmitters to cell phones, personal digital assistants, and laptop computers.

Distribution systems were also being developed for TV delivery via the Internet. On its ZVUE Web site, Canada’s Handheld Entertainment made available about 3,500 downloadable video segments from CBC/Radio-Canada, including popular TV shows and online video selections. German public service networks ARD and ZDF teamed up with T-Com to offer 100 channels of Internet Protocol TV via a transmission system called very-high-speed digital subscriber line. Mainstream TV distributors such as Liberty Global’s UPC—Europe’s biggest cable operator—began to show traditional programs mixed with user-generated content on personal video channels integrated into the Internet TV system. Yahoo! and Australia’s Seven Network inaugurated Yahoo!7 to integrate media and online technologies, including live TV delivery over the Internet.

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission approved U.S.-based HDNet for distributing high-definition (HD) television programming in Canada. Spain created the HD Forum to help bring together manufacturers, content providers, and other parties involved in high-definition technologies. High-definition next-generation DVD players, which read either Blu-ray discs or HD DVDs, required the enhanced image resolution of HDTV. Among the largest new HDTV units marketed during the year were a Sharp 165-cm (65-in) LCD TV, a Panasonic 262-cm (103-in) plasma-screen TV, and a Samsung 142-cm (56-in) rear-projection TV with a technology called digital light processing. This technology was based on a semiconductor chip that held an array of a large number of movable microscopic mirrors.

Radio

In 2006 Howard Stern, long the most prominent personality in American morning radio, completed his switch to Sirius Satellite Radio. Stern, who had long complained about being censored under the rules governing terrestrial radio, made a point of underscoring satellite radio’s freedom. Other high-profile media personalities also embraced satellite radio. TV talk-show host Oprah Winfrey agreed to headline a channel on XM Satellite Radio called Oprah & Friends, which included programs by regular contributors to The Oprah Winfrey Show and the magazine O. Sirius and XM offered hundreds of uncensored music and talk-show channels, most of them commercial-free, and by the middle of the year more than 11 million listeners had purchased the hardware and subscriptions that allowed them to listen to satellite-radio transmissions.

Radio listeners were being drawn away from the AM/FM bands not only by satellite radio but also by Internet music sites and portable digital music players (such as Apple’s iPod), which could play music or downloadable podcasts of news and information. In the United States even faithful listeners spent 14% less time listening to their radios than they had a decade earlier. As the value of radio stations diminished, even the industry’s biggest players—including Clear Channel, owner of more than 1,100 stations—were either selling off radio properties or talking openly about doing so. Nevertheless, the industry worked actively to regain its position with consumers and the marketplace in general. A potential area of growth was radio-station Internet sites, which typically offered video- and music-on-demand features. A study by Credit Suisse of the 12 leading Web-radio sites noted a substantial 33.5% growth in Internet radio listeners, of which 65.5% were young (18–49 years old) and 57.9% were men.

Some stations experimented with less-rigid music formats, and others took advantage of technology for digital radio broadcasting. In the United States some companies launched HD Radio stations. HD Radio—a system developed by iBiquity Digital—made it possible to transmit a digital signal together with a radio station’s regular analog signal, and it offered superior sound to the listeners who were willing to pay for HD Radio digital receivers. The HD Digital Radio Alliance, a consortium of major radio companies, announced that by the end of the year, more than 1,000 stations were broadcasting in HD Radio.

Digital radio was also expanding in other countries. Belgium-based TDPradio, the brainchild of program manager Daniël Versmissen, celebrated its third year as the first and only dance radio station that broadcast worldwide in Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM), an open digital standard for worldwide radio broadcasting in shortwave and other radio bands. Radio Romania International commenced using DRM assisted by WRN, a London-based provider for the transmission of digital radio and television. To celebrate its 70th birthday, Radio Prague, the international service of Czech Radio, launched digital broadcasting in English and German for central and southeastern Europe. Radio Australia, the international arm of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., launched digital radio service in Singapore and broadcast in English and in Mandarin Chinese. It also established a studio for students at the Australian International School campus in Singapore to make broadcasts via digital radio over an education channel, the Airducation Broadcasting Channel. A new digital channel announced by TBS Radio was to be the first in Japan to concentrate on classical music. Together with the music, it would simultaneously transmit data that included the names of composers and performers of the pieces being aired.

In other developments, Syrian Prime Minister Muhammad Naji al-Otari licensed Arnus Brothers & Partners to establish Syria’s first private commercial radio station, which was named Version FM Middle East. The premier also authorized Harith Group & Partners to establish a second private commercial radio, called Sahm FM. Turkish Radio Delta FM began to broadcast a program called Voice of Azerbaijan. Presenter Fidan Guliyeva said that the two-hour program aimed to “voice the truth on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.” BBC Kyrgyz and BBC Uzbek expanded World Service’s FM broadcasts in Kyrgyzstan, and BBC World Service for the first time launched a marketing campaign in six cities in Afghanistan to promote its Pashto- and Dari-language broadcasts. BBC’s Third Programme, which became known as Radio 3, celebrated the 60th anniversary of its establishment.